“We’ll keep fighting on,” reflects Cooper

20 April 2016

Defender looks back at defeat to Hull

Despite defeat to Hull City, Royals goalscorer Jake Cooper vowed that he and the Reading team will keep battling and scrapping to try and earn every point available until the curtain falls on the 2015/16 season.

Cooper’s opener against the Tigers – a towering header from a delightful Oliver Norwood free-kick – had Reading in a commanding position in the early stages. But Abel Hernandez slotted in an equaliser 15 minutes later, before Hull got the final blow through Andy Robertson as the game ticked into the final ten minutes.

“We’re obviously very disappointed with the result after a really strong start, but we’ll keep fighting on,” reflected the defender.

“We’ve got three games coming up where we’ll show what we can do. The results haven’t been matching our performances so hopefully we can go again on Saturday.

“We had a great start against Hull, which is what we’ve been looking for – we’ve had a few games recently where we’ve had slow starts and we really wanted to turn that around. We were attacking for the opening ten or fifteen minutes of the game and to get that goal was great for us – we could have had more.

“That’s how we want to start games, just need to carry that intensity on for the full 90 minutes and get the three points – which unfortunately didn’t happen today.

“Hull are a good team, they’ve got the players. They got relegated last season and they’re showing why they’ll be in the play-offs. But we really feel that we can be up there with teams like this and we can perform well against the top teams in the league.”

Before Robertson’s winner, some confusion reigned when Reading sub Deniss Rakels went down under a challenge in the area; the referee initially pointed to the spot but as Yann Kermorgant was teeing up the ball to take the kick, he overturned the decision and awarded no more than a corner.

“I thought he’d given it, but then he spoke to the linesmen and changed the call, but I guess that’s why the linesman is there,” Cooper continued.

“Obviously we feel hard done by, we thought it was a penalty but these things happen in football, we have to deal with it and just get on with it. Hopefully our luck will change in the future.”

Despite the disappointment of defeat, the focus will switch quickly to a trip to Loftus Road on Saturday – Reading’s next chance to secure some points comes with a trip to Queens Park Rangers.

Cooper continued: “We go away on Saturday to a tough QPR team and show again the quality we have in our team and get all three points this time.

“We always try and win every game, we’re going to try win the last three games of the season and that starts on Saturday against QPR so that’s our main focus from now.”